In Their Own Terms

The Growing Transgender Presence in Pop Culture

Rhys Ernst, left, and his partner, Zackary Drucker, at “Relationship,” their exhibition of photographs being shown in the Whitney Biennial.Credit
Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

The first time Rhys Ernst saw Zackary Drucker was in 2005 at a bar in the East Village.

At the time, both were aspiring artists. Rhys had recently graduated from Hampshire College and was working for MTV networks. Zackary had graduated from the School of Visual Arts and was appearing on a reality TV show called “Artstar,” hosted by Jeffrey Deitch.

But there was one clear impediment to romance: Rhys had never dated a man, and Zackary had never dated a woman.

And in “Relationship,” a photo exhibition currently on view at the Whitney Biennial, the two have chronicled that process and the evolution of their own love affair. (In a recent preview of the Biennial, Holland Cotter of The New York Times wrote that the Ernst/Drucker photographs “put queer consciousness on the front burner.”)

That a show by two transgender artists should be so prominently featured at the 2014 Biennial should come as a surprise to no one. It is just more evidence of the increasing presence of trans people at the center of popular culture.

In their spring advertising campaigns, the luxury retailer Barneys New York and the award-winning jewelry designer Alexis Bittar feature transgender models. In February, a memoir by Janet Mock, a former editor at People magazine, which drew heavily on her transition from male to female, made the New York Times best-seller list. Laverne Cox has become a breakout star on Netflix’s hit show “Orange Is the New Black,” playing a sympathetic character who winds up in prison after using stolen credit cards to pay for her gender reassignment surgery. And Carmen Carrera, a transgender showgirl who first achieved demi-fame as a contestant on the reality television program “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” has become an in-demand fashion model and muse for the photographer Steven Meisel.

Here are their stories.

Laverne Cox

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Credit
Rommel Demano/Getty Images

Laverne Cox grew up in Mobile, Ala., with her identical twin brother and her mother, a single parent who worked two to three jobs at a time to make ends meet.

She enrolled at Marymount Manhattan College in New York in the late ‘90s, where by day she majored in dance, took her first acting classes and became immersed in gender studies.

By night, Ms. Cox was a presence on the downtown club scene, hanging out at Flamingo East in the East Village and performing operatic versions of heavy metal songs at Squeeze Box, a Friday night party at Don Hill’s. (Among the songs she sang were Iron Maiden’s “Be Quick or Be Dead” and Pantera’s “Mouth for War.”)

At the time, Ms. Cox said, she was in a “gender nonconforming space,” no longer living as a man, but still struggling with her own “internalized transphobia” as well as a desire to “be myself and not embody some stereotype of womanhood.”

“It was a mess,” she said.

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Laverne Cox, plays the transgender character Sophia in a scene from “Orange Is the New Black.”Credit
Eric Leibowitz/Netflix

After completing her transition, she was cast in 2008 on the VH1 reality show “I Want to Work for Diddy.” (Ms. Cox made it halfway through the competition.) Last year, she got her big break with a role on “Orange Is the New Black” on Netflix.

On the show, the major characters appear in prison and then in flashback sequences that show how they got there. So Ms. Cox’s twin, a musician who lives in Brooklyn, played her character pretransition.

Ms. Cox has spoken at colleges about the transgender experience. She’s also done one now-famous chat on a daytime talk show, where she appeared with Carmen Carrera and gently chastised the host, Katie Couric, for being too focused on questions about genital surgery, which not every transgender person undergoes. After Ms. Couric said to Ms. Carrera, “Your private parts are different now, aren’t they,” Ms. Cox argued that focusing on this objectifies trans people and prevents a more meaningful discussion from taking place.

“Someone called me a man in the airport today,” Ms. Cox said in an interview this week. “Just because there’s a few trans folks having lovely careers and having moments of visibility does not mean that a lot of trans folks lives are not in peril. We need to remember those folks who are struggling, particularly trans women of color who are on the margins.”

Janet Mock

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Credit
Aaron Tredwell

Some success stories are neat. Others, like Janet Mock’s, less so. She grew up in Hawaii with a mother who had her first child at 16 and a father who battled drug addiction and had numerous children with other women. (One year, Ms. Mock said, her father “had a baby in January, February and April.”)

Then, in middle school, Ms. Mock met a transgender girl named Wendi, and at 12 or 13, she began applying lip gloss, wearing makeup and tweezing her eyebrows. At 15, she started hormones.

She was an honor student in high school while she worked as a prostitute on Merchant Street in Honolulu, which is how she saved the money to travel to Thailand and pay for gender reassignment surgery.

After graduating from the University of Hawaii in 2005, Ms. Mock became an editor at People.com, then came out as transgender in a 2011 Marie Claire profile.

This winter, Atria Books (a division of Simon and Schuster) published her memoir, “Redefining Realness,” in which she quotes Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou but wrote that Beyoncé was most responsible for “shifting” how she viewed herself as a woman of color.

“Everyone celebrated her because she was the girl of the moment,” said Ms. Mock, 31, who has frizzy, Afro-ish hair with blond highlights, and, on the day I met her, looked effortlessly fashionable in a pair of black Theory jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing off her gold-colored infinity bangles. On her arm was a tan leather 3.1 Phillip Lim bag, which she said was a gift to herself after her book became a best seller.

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Like Ms. Cox and Ms. Carrera, she has been somewhat offended by the tone of some of her television interviews. Last month, Ms. Mock went on Piers Morgan’s CNN show (it has since been canceled), where the host all but began the interview by saying how “amazing” it was that this attractive woman had once been biologically male.

“Had I not known your life story, I would have absolutely no clue,” he said, as the scrawl at the bottom of the bottom of the screen read “Born a boy.”

Ms. Mock pounced on Twitter, and Slate ran a withering piece on Mr. Morgan’s performance that evening, chastising him for being “obsessed with appearances” and accusing the show of promoting the segment in a “sensational and ignorant way.”

Nevertheless, the interest in Ms. Mock’s book and its subsequent sales is an indication that something is changing dramatically. And, no doubt, she appreciates having a platform now.

As a child, she said: “All I knew was gay. All I knew was RuPaul.”

Valentijn de Hingh

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Credit
Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

A Dutch camera crew followed Valentijn de Hingh around for the bulk of her childhood, chronicling her journey from male to female. By the end of high school, she was walking in runway shows for Comme des Garçons and Maison Martin Margiela. In 2012, she gave a talk at a TEDx event in Amsterdam titled “Why Did I Choose?” This year, she is appearing in the Barneys campaign alongside 16 other transgender models.

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Valentijn de Hingh, left, in the new Barneys campaign, which features 16 transgender models.Credit
Bruce Weber

Having understanding parents helped, she said.

They first read about transgender children in a magazine when Ms. de Hingh was 5 and took her to a hospital in the Netherlands with a program for gender-variant children.

“My parents were looking for answers, and they found it there,” she said.

Schoolmates, she said, were largely accepting, though she did experience some taunting. Being openly transgender but preoperative made dating hard, something she struggles with, even after gender reassignment surgery.

“I still have a hard time with dating,” said Ms. de Hingh, 23. “I have some figuring out to do.”

Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker

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“The Longest Day of the Year,” from Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst’s exhibition at the Whitney Biennial.Credit
Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst/Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Many of the photographs in Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst’s show at the Whitney capture them in scenarios most couples can relate to: celebrating anniversaries, lounging around the house while one fights off a cold, sitting poolside on a sunny day.

Others depict circumstances that are perhaps unique to a transgender couple, such as an image of Mr. Ernst’s and Ms. Drucker’s bandage-covered backsides shortly after taking hormone shots.

According to Ms. Drucker, the exhibition has a couple of aims. One is to show that all relationships are in some way banal. Another, she said, is about “learning to love ourselves and deflect the distortions” that prevent people from doing that.

There weren’t a lot of transgender role models for Ms. Drucker and Mr. Ernst growing up. But their parents were progressive and supported their children’s gender nonconformity.

In high school, they both became familiar with the writings of Kate Bornstein, a queer theorist whose books “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us,” and “My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely” outlined a way of living that did not ascribe to traditional gender conventions.

“I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man,” Ms. Bornstein once said.

Today, the couple lives in Los Angeles and has been consulting on the pilot of a television show for Amazon called “Transparent.” It stars Jeffrey Tambor of “Arrested Development” as an aging man who is beginning a gender transition. (It was picked up on Tuesday.)

They are also part of a wide circle of “gender queer” and transgender creative types that includes Wu Tsang (a filmmaker and visual artist who identifies as “transfeminine” and “transguy”) and Amos Mac, a photographer and editor who runs Originalplumbing, a magazine and website, that are devoted to hipsterish transgender types.

This pretty much describes Ms. Drucker, 30, who has a penchant for tight leggings, vintage Yves Saint Laurent heels and Grecian tops — and yet has no plans to have gender reassignment surgery, a topic she discusses pretty openly.

The same goes for Mr. Ernst, 31, who sports a light goatee and on Friday was wearing a button-down shirt with high tops and charcoal pants.

Ultimately, Ms. Drucker said, she’d like to get to a point where we “surpass” the binaries of gender altogether.

“That would be the greatest transition of all,” she said.

Correction: March 20, 2014
Because of an editing error, an article last Thursday about wider acceptance of transgendered people misstated the surname of a longtime New York Times critic who reviewed a photo exhibition at the Whitney Biennial by a transgender couple. He is Holland Cotter, not Carter.